ted to depict in music an imperious, ambitious, unscrupulous and
wicked woman with a temper that in the end is her own undoing; he felt
the necessity of contrasting her with Elsa, sweet, gentle and
lamentably weak--Elsa, who is strong, or, rather, pertinacious, only
once, and at the wrong time; and, third, he felt that his act would
terminate rather tamely with a mere wedding-march. The result is this
noisy melodramatic scene, with its melodramatic music. It could not be
otherwise. Music cannot express anger--at best it can only suggest. By
anger I mean human anger--the god's wrath of a Wotan is a different
matter. Bruennhilda knows Wotan to be angry by the raging storm that
marks his path through the heavens, by the lightnings and thunders;
and we have all enough of our primitive ancestors in us to feel in
some degree as they felt--indeed, plenty of people to-day see in a
storm a manifestation of the wrath of the Almighty. Human anger has
never been put into music. Why, Ortrud alternates her rantings (mere
recitative) with beautiful phrases of the same pattern as those sung
by Elsa! The music for the orchestra is turbulent rather than
forcible; it is incoherent in the old-fashioned way: essentially--in
spite of a free use of discords--it is as old-fashioned as anything in
_Don Giovanni_. Frederick and Lohengrin have hot words, and Telramund
is supposed to be a hotheaded idiot and Lohengrin a spotless, handsome
hero; and lo! with due regard for the respective ranges of their
voices, they might sing each other's music and no harm done. When the
chorus enters a very imposing piece of music is wrought, largely out
of the Ortrud insinuating theme (_f_); but it is not dramatic music.
The ending with the resumption of the procession is one of Wagner's
noblest things. It is not in the customary sense of the phrase an
operatic finale, but a perfectly satisfying piece of music that
prepares us for a pause during which we can take breath before the
action of the drama is taken up again in the third Act.

IV

In that act we have the central idea of the opera--the poetic and the
musical idea--clearly, definitely set forth--the idea of Montsalvat,
far away up the rippling river on which the white swan
floated--Montsalvat, the land of eternal dawn, where all things
remained for ever young, and the flowers and the corn grew always and
never faded nor fell to the sickle. It is the land Mignon aspired
to--"Oh let me for ever then re